Ceiling Trap

Verified against the spelunky.ai port v0.1.10 on 27 October 2026.

The Ceiling Trap guards the Temple's Golden Idol. The idol's room looks like any other until the idol is picked up: then a stone door drops into each of the room's two openings, and the room's ceiling, a row of blocks with spikes underneath, starts to come down. It moves slowly, but nothing stops it short of the floor, and it takes 10 hearts a step from a player it reaches.

Picking up the idol on a Temple level shakes the screen, sets every Ceiling Trap block in the level dropping, and sets falling the doors nearest to points up and to the left and right of the player ^[2].

• The doors are two blocks tall, set into the room's side walls. Each falls, gaining speed up to 6 pixels a step, until it lands on the floor, filling the opening below it ^[3]. The wall where it stood was a stand-in that turns into an ordinary block once the door has left it, so the wall stays whole ^[4].
• The ceiling comes down 1 pixel every 4 steps (7.5 pixels a second), showing its spikes, until it rests on what's below it ^{[5] [6]}.

In the clip, the player walks into the idol room and picks the idol up; both doors are down 7 steps later. The ceiling reaches his head 320 steps (10.67 seconds) after the pickup and kills him, and settles on the floor 59 steps after that.

A Ceiling Trap block that has started to drop takes 10 hearts on every step it touches the top of the player's head ^[1]. Nothing spaces out the hits, and each one he takes alive is counted in the end-of-game statistics' ceiling trap row ^[7]. One that keeps coming down over him also crushes him ^[8].

Only in the Temple's idol room. Each side room off the path through a Temple level has a 3 in 4 chance of being one of the special side rooms; of those, the first roll is 1 in 12 for a Kali altar (once a level), and then 1 in 12 for the idol room, once a level, never in the City of Gold ^[9]. The room has six Ceiling Trap blocks across its ceiling, a door on each side, and the idol on the floor ^{[10] [11]}.

• Leave the idol. Nothing happens until it's picked up.
• Break out. The doors and the ceiling blocks aren't unbreakable: a Bomb's blast destroys them as it does blocks, and so does the rock around the room.
• Use the time. The ceiling takes over 10 seconds to come down to a standing player's head.

• Monsters don't take the 10 hearts' worth of damage: that check is the player's alone.
• The idol only sets the trap off once ^[12].

• Both objects have a state for going back up, RETURN, that nothing ever enters: the ceiling stays down ^[13].
• If a Temple idol were picked up in a level without a Ceiling Trap, the player's code would destroy the skull blocks within 90 pixels of him instead; the Temple's only idol room always has the trap ^[14].